


Holding On to Letting Go

by jazzjo



Series: AoS Amalie-verse [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-02
Updated: 2014-12-02
Packaged: 2018-02-27 20:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2706245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzjo/pseuds/jazzjo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things that happened that day that no one else knows of. No one else knew what happened the moment she stepped through those doors with no back-up and no extraction plan, with one aim and the determination to get back to Amalie alive. </p><p>She didn't lose anyone in there - Melinda May didn't lose people, after all - only herself. </p><p>Companion piece to Your Hand in Mine, about what happened in Manama, Bahrain. (A/N: Pure speculation! None of us really know what happened in Bahrain, but I can imagine, right?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holding On to Letting Go

**Author's Note:**

> Here's my take on Bahrain, and how the difference of being sent on the assignment alone without Coulson, and having Amalie to consider would factor into it.

They should have known better. They were dealing with a cult worshipping a Gifted; they should have known that something untoward would happen. 

 

The junior agents who they had assigned to surveillance for the three days before May had come in for the investigation for an Index Asset Evaluation and Intake had had a pretty uneventful couple of days. Every check in and daily report that they had given was the same — the Gifted and their cult were waiting in the compound for S.H.I.E.L.D. to send a senior agent in to file the evaluation. 

 

May had gone in on her own — she had no one else with her, after all — unarmed and only having the barest of ideas of what had gone down in the facility. 

 

All she knew for sure was that the seven junior agents they had in there were held captive, and they needed to be brought back out _safe_ and alive. 

 

There was a girl in there as well. One girl, not S.H.I.E.L.D., probably civilian. That was all she had managed to get from the reports that had come in panicky while she had been landing the jet on a thin strip of concrete. 

 

So there she was now, in a squat building that seemed like their headquarters, the better part of a fifty mercenaries lying, in varying degrees of twisted, along the pale red of the corridor. The ties on each of the junior agents had been broken and she gave them explicit instructions to head straight to the jet and not let anyone in until she returned. 

 

After witnessing all five feet four inches of Melinda May take out the mercenaries with her bare hands, all the junior agents could manage was a meek nod each and frantic whispering as they fled the compound.

 

If she hadn’t returned in two hours, the most senior of them — Grant Ward, she thought his name was — was to make the call to sit tight and wait for her to return, if she returned, or to set the jet on autopilot straight back to the Triskelion. 

 

Melinda May did not lose people, especially if they were civilians and had no place in the fight that they were fighting. She would not leave the facility until she had found and freed that girl. 

 

Striding down the narrow hallway silently, May checked each room as she approached it, checking for signs of more mercenaries or perhaps the remaining members of the cult themselves. Through the third door she had come upon, she finally found the one she was looking for. 

 

With her back facing the door, two thin legs dangling off the side of what looked like a hospital bed, the girl let her thick dark hair hang down one side of her face, her head bent down as if she was looking at something in her lap. 

 

On the one arm that May could see, the knuckles were bruised and scarred, and winding up and down her thin arm were cigarette burns and other scars and open wounds. 

 

She could not have been more than four years old, her shoulders round and legs short.

 

May approached her gingerly, senses still on high alert in case anyone came round to attack the both of them. The gifted they had heard of had the ability to manipulate one’s perception of feelings and sensations, the like. Goodness only knew what they might have done to the poor child. 

 

Seeing the girl’s frame trembling where she sat, May reached one hand out cautiously, placing it on the girl’s shoulder. 

 

“You’re alright, you’re safe,” She tried to keep her voice steady, level, feeling the memories of the last time she had been in this position all too acutely, “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to bring you away from this place, alright?” 

 

“Papa was right,” The child turned her head, her eyes a bright glowing violet, a wide smile on her face, “You came!”

 

She hopped off the bed in one fluid motion, and suddenly the members of the cult in their white cloaks with violet streaks came pouring through the door, a bearded man with the same dark hair leading the group. 

 

“Sasha, you know what to do,” He spoke directly into those violet eyes, his voice low and rumbling, “You know how to protect us all.”

 

May felt a burning course through her veins, felt every bad memory she had ever had and buried float carelessly to the surface of her mind, felt every bruise and every graze and every gunshot she had ever had. 

 

At first she could fend it off. Push away the negative energy and use it as she took down each cult member in much the same way that she had taken out the mercenaries. At first the pain could be turned into red hot rage and she could use it, all until there were only one person left in the room with her. 

 

“Sasha, you don’t have to do this,” May choked out, “Your father, he’s gone. He can’t hurt you anymore. He can’t use you anymore. I can help you, Sasha.”

 

The girl faced her stoically, cocking her head to the left as she swept her violet gaze up and down Melinda’s near writhing form. A sickly sweet smile overtook her face, her hands reaching out towards May. 

 

“Can we play?” She grasped May’s hand, and the pain stopped momentarily as May gave in to the girl’s tugging.

 

She sat with May on the hospital bed, creating a surge of memories in May’s mind of her childhood and Academy days.

 

“Tell me a story!” Sasha giggled brightly, a tinkling sound, “I love stories.”

 

At first May started with stories from her childhood, fables that her mother had gotten her to read in their original Mandarin Chinese versions. She had been speaking for a couple of minutes when it began to feel like the words in her mouth were being shoved back in, and new ones were being ripped out. 

 

“No! I don’t like these stories!” Sasha’s eyes dimmed to a muted blue, her lips curving into a pout, “Another one.”

 

It was trial and error from there on out. Every couple of sentences May would be faced with a new sensation, like her tongue being physically tied or pinpricks on her entire body. She had brought up having to leave, or bringing Sasha to somewhere safe, where she would be cared for and treated kindly. 

 

The child had not taken it well. 

 

Her mind created restraints, holding May down as she threw a temper tantrum.

 

“You can’t go! Everyone keeps trying to go!” Fat tears were rolling down Sasha’s face as she screamed.

 

Melinda could not move, every inch of her body feeling like it was being tied down with barbed wire. Sporadic bursts of the girl’s powers sent jolts of pain through May’s body, and soon it manifested in the form of manipulating memories. 

 

She could not move to stop anything, having to live through scenarios that made her want to just break her own neck as she sat there fighting restraints she could not even see. It began to feel like her muscles were losing all their abilities, and even fighting the restraints became an impossibility. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Bodies lay scattered about the linoleum tiled floors of the facility, mainly agents of Hydra with a few of their own fallen in their midst. May had sorted a good number of the Hydra agents out while Phil had focused on evacuating everyone else, and now that there were no longer any more hostiles around, the uninjured were reentering the compound to carry their fallen comrades out to where the jet was waiting to take them back to base. 

 

May went from room to room of the research facility, her demeanour alert and on edge as she sought out any hostiles that may have escaped their notice previously. Equipment lay strewn around, abandoned the moment the conflict outside each room had evidently tipped in favour of S.H.I.E.L.D rather than Hydra. Broken glass was scattered around many of the floors, like the first snowflakes on a bare concrete pavement. 

 

Each step was purposeful, silent as she stalked from doorway to doorway. The final room on the floor was before her and she could hear Coulson taking stock of every agent and civilian that was being loaded into the jet as she cleared the compound.

 

Pushing the final door open she peered in, almost turning to shout to her partner that the compound was clear and they could move out when she saw a small thrashing movement coming from the corner of the room behind the door. Stepping in, May quickened her wide strides the moment she realised that the source of the motions was a small figure restrained to a bed. Her eyes met the burning steel blue of the young child’s, stretched wide open in panic and fear. 

 

Before she could do anything, she heard the child gasp in the midst of all her screaming, and then she began to cough and choke. Blood began to exit her mouth in spurts, staining the crisp white of the sheets a bright scarlet. Try as May might to undo the restraints keeping her tied to the bed quickly and to help her to sit up, a last violent gurgle left the small frame limp and unmoving in Melinda’s arms. 

 

“Why do you like her more than me?” Sasha’s high pitched voice drifted through the haze of the nightmarish scene, “It would be so much easier with her dead.”

 

Phil burst through the door of the room that May was in, staring blankly at the limp body in her arms. The same bright scarlet was blossoming on his suit, damp and sticky as he crumpled to the ground clutching his chest. 

 

“You’d have to kill me to stop me,” The voice came once more, “Papa says I’m indestructible. You cannot stop me, you don’t have the guts to do it.”

 

May squeezed her eyes shut tightly, willing herself to be stronger than the tricks that were being played on her mind. 

 

Amalie was fine. She was with Phil and Jemma and Maria, safe. Phil was safe. Being bumped up to Level Eight meant that he was more or less out of the field. He didn’t die during that extraction mission. 

 

“No one never told you what happened to twenty five, did they?” Each word was punctuated by what felt like each muscle in her body being individually severed, “They never told you that twenty five could do anything she wanted from wherever she was. They never told you that twenty five was Sasha and that she had a whole army inside her that a cavalry couldn’t take down.”

 

The voice was no longer childlike. It came in the form of a child’s voice — innocent, high and lilting — but every tinge of emotion and intent in the words it spoke was dripping with malice and bloodshed. 

 

“They never said that twenty five could push you to the brink and that you would snap,” She could hear the laughing behind each and every word now, “They never told you that you would either kill yourself or kill everyone around you.”

 

Now that every muscle had been torn apart, the violet eyes moved on to her bones, words still circling about her consciousness at an alarming volume, “Can you, Qiaolian? Can you kill a four year old in cold blood to save yourself?”

 

She would have no way out. The jet had taken off in the middle of the second scenario that Sasha had played with. She had to get herself out of this mess. 

 

She had to get back to Amalie. She’d promised she would be back the next day. 

 

If anything, she could not subject her to only being raised by Coulson. 

 

There had been too many hours of the same form of torture. Visions of people dying in ways they shouldn’t have to, escalating to the point where Sasha made her kill Amalie herself.

 

She couldn’t un-see the red. 

 

Too much red, all over her own hands. A kind a red that she had never seen before. Not the darkened red of every opponent she had ever come up against, tainted already, but a kind of lightness to it when it was first shed that weighed down both her hands when they became covered in it. 

 

She had tried to subdue to the girl. Breaking the restraints had been hard enough, taking every ounce of her resolve and every inch of the pain that had been pumped through her system. Finally they had frayed enough for her hands to slip free. 

 

Trying pressure points, plain old sedatives, anything. Her hands had made a thousand different attempts to make the girl stand down, to make her fall asleep or unconscious to incapacitate her for a moment. 

 

Every attempt had been met with a more violent scenario playing out in her mind. 

 

“This is all your fault,” The voice had taunted, “It is no one’s fault but your own that you have so many demons to be awoken.” 

 

By the time she heard a new jet landing outside the compound, she had no other choice. 

 

“If they come in, and I’m still alive,” Sasha had mocked cheerily, “I can make you kill them just like I’ve been showing you. Just as much blood, just as much violence, using every one of your skills that you learned from their agency and turn it around on them.”

 

“You’re a monster in the making, Qiaolian,” The girl leant her head on Melinda’s shaking shoulder, “No matter which path you choose. You’ll never be the same.”

 

“I could have been her — Amalie — I could,” She took Melinda’s hand as she spoke, “And she could have been me.”

 

She heard the front door creak open, heard Maria of all people calling out for her, and she took a reluctant breath. She broke her neck cleanly, as swiftly as she could. The pain never stopped, though. 

 

The least Melinda May could say was that she got out of there alive, her head held level and her shoulders back as she walked out of the compound past all the opponents that she had felled on her way in. She did not say a word to anyone on the flight back to the Triskelion, sitting in the medical bay dressing her own wounds. 

 

* * *

 

 

If you asked S.H.I.E.L.D., everyone on the side of good had come out of Bahrain alive. 

 

If you asked The Cavalry, well, you’d never really know. 


End file.
